Big-bale silage: a 45-year retrospection

While big-bale silage is a widely accepted part of silage preservation in Ireland in 2025, my first exposure to the system was in October 1980, 45 years ago this year.

In September of that year, Irish Farmers Journal editor at the time, Paddy O’Keeffe received an invitation from a company called Farmhand UK to travel to a farm in Bath, Wiltshire, England, to view a demonstration of making, storing and feeding out of large bale silage.

I was the journalist deputised to make the journey to the farm of Stephen Bowles at Church Farm, Winsley, Bradford-on-Avon, and to meet the then Farmhand UK sales manager, Laurence Padfield, and his boss, John Perry.

Farmhand UK was then based in Wymondham, Norfolk. The company was the importer of US-manufactured Vermeer balers, which were rebranded as Farmhand, along with a range of silage feeding machinery from North America.

The Irish representative at that time for Farmhand UK was Pat Murphy. Both Pat and I travelled to Bradford-on-Avon on what was then an expensive Aer Lingus flight costing about £165 return, half my then monthly wages! Fortunately, for me Farmhand UK covered my costs.

It was a wet Tuesday October morning when we arrived at Church Farm and the tea before the 11am start to proceedings was well appreciated. Coffee wasn’t the thing back then that it is today.

Russell Hales, then field specialist at Farmhand UK, gave a rundown on the ability of the company’s Farmhand 804HD baler in making round bales of silage. Prior to that, round bales of hay or straw were considered to the only options.

He regaled the brilliance of the machine and how its variable chamber belt design could tightly roll the bales to preserve the grass exclude any air from leading bale spoilage. The baler had been tested on the farm of Lloyd Forster during 1979 where the bales were then placed in heavy-duty plastic bags and sealed tightly.

This was followed by a presentation from then ADAS expert Peter Redman on how to open the bags and manage the feeding of the silage. He explained the positive results of the silage quality analysis.

Pioneer

It was then time to hear from the man himself, the true pioneer of the system, Lloyd Forster. In his practical, non-nonsense Northumberland farmer way, Lloyd explained what he had done on his farm by bagging bales of fresh grass silage in 1979. He had the bags made locally especially for the job and sealed them tightly using lamb castrating rings, with great success.

He explained how he felt that this system was a practical option for many livestock farmers who were struggling to make hay and did not have the yards and capital to invest in large conventional silage pits. Then he opened the bags and began feeding the silage to the beef cattle in the yard. They all enthusiastically munched into the feed.

For me, I remember clearly that it was not so much the process of how the bales were being baled and bagged that impressed me, but the quality of the silage from the bags. This was good-quality winter feed and obviously Lloyd picked his best bales to impress us.

So, we all came away with the view that the bagged silage could deliver much better result than the poor-quality hay that we had seen for three years in a row.

I remember enthusiastically explaining this to my colleagues back in the Irish Farmers Journal and some of the Teagasc teams (then ACOT), but not everyone was as convinced. It was the smell and quality of the silage that impressed me on the day.

Scottish researchers had already bought into the system and the East of Scotland College of Agriculture produced the first four-page advisory booklet on the topic of silage – in the bag, in 1980. But bagging bales was slow and labour demanding. The bale was lifted on a tractor spike, front or rear-mounted and the bag pulled up over the bale with its tightened end slid through a pipe and then ring slipped over the end the bag to seal it.

The team at Virginia Milk Products in Cavan realised how this bagged silage could provide a solution from smaller dairy farmers who were constantly struggling to remain profitable while supplementing poor quality hay with expensive concentrate feed. They joined forces with Volac, a calf milk replacer company, also based in Cavan, to promote the bagged silage system. They supported with grant-aid the purchase of Farmhand round balers through a pilot programme.

The system had obvious appeal for many smaller farmers, but access to a loader or rear spike was a problem and the system was proving too slow to gain acceptance. ACOT/Teagasc was not fully on board.

Problems

I recall going to farmer meetings where the advisory service message was rather to make small square bales of silage and cover them in a sectional clamp, as a cheaper option and given that there were already plenty of idle small square balers in the country.

Farmers did not buy this approach; the small square bales of silage were too heavy for manual lifting and too small to be properly mechanised. There were problems with sealing these small bales in groups of 40 or 60 a single pit. They quickly deteriorated as it was difficult to exclude air once the pit was opened.

The arrival of the bale wrapper changed everything and speeded up the uptake of round bale silage, without the bags. Tanco was one of the first pioneers of the system and was asked to look at developing a machine back in 1985.

It first developed a handheld wrapping system where a spool of black clingfilm was manually held beside the bale as it was rotated on a spike on the rear of the tractor. This looked like the ideal small farmer solution.

However, it required some operator skill, not to mention strength and there were farm safety concerns, so it had a short lifecycle. I remember using it and it sure was test of the biceps.

That same year, the Norwegian company Underhaug built its first bale wrapper. The following year, in 1986, Underhaug was taken over by Kverneland and the wrappers became known as the Kverneland Underhaug wrappers. Around that time, Volac became the Irish agent for the Kverneland bale wrappers and it was commonly called the Volac wrapper.

This was instantly a big seller. Liam de Paor, manager at Volac, was an enthusiastic advocate and was supported in the field at the time by two young agricultural engineers, Danny O’Connor and Philip Connell, who kept the machines going, explaining how to use them, across the length and breadth of Ireland.

In 1987, another Irish leading player McHale entered the bale wrapping market with a machine. By the end of that decade there were many others testing their designs. These included Archway, Conor and Roco in Ireland and Parmiter and Reco in Britain.

The Irish Farmers Journal organised the first National Round Bale Silage demonstration in conjunction with Teagasc in June 1989 at Multyfarnham Agricultural College to let farmers see the machines in action.

Five balers were compared on the day and the bales weighed and the Krone team at Farmhand in Ireland came prepared with a machine that topped the scales reading. Farmers were keen to see the wrappers, while the baler teams were emphasising their bale weight advantages.

Six years later, a second one with more emphasis on the arrival of the new chopper balers as well as wrapping and combination baling and wrapping machines, was held at Mellows Agricultural College, Athenry.

The appetite for new system was still strong and the McHale Fusion 1 was introduced in 2002. Irish companies, McHale and Tanco, continue to be world leaders in the field of bale wrapping, supported in their development by farmers and contractors who worked with them to develop machines that now have a lofty worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.

And the rest is history.